Albert Bates Lord (15 September 1912 – 29 July 1991) was a professor of Slavic and comparative literature at Harvard University who carried on Milman Parry's research on epic poetry after Parry's death.
Early life
Lord was born in Boston, Massachusetts. He graduated from Boston Latin School in 1930 and attended Harvard College, where he received an A.B. in classics in 1934 and a Ph.D. in comparative literature in 1949.[1]
Career
Lord became a professor of Slavic and comparative literature at Harvard in 1950. He was later promoted as a full professor there in Classics. He also founded Harvard's Committee on Degrees in Folklore and Mythology, and chaired the college's Department of Folklore and Mythology until his retirement in 1983.[1]
Lord authored the book The Singer of Tales, first published in 1960.[1] It was reissued in a 40th anniversary edition, with an audio compact disc to aid in the understanding of the recorded renditions discussed in the text.[2] His wife Mary Louise Lord completed and edited his manuscript of a posthumous sequel The Singer Resumes the Tale (published 1995) which further supports and extends Lord's initial conclusions.[3]
Lord demonstrated the ways in which various great ancient epics from Europe and Asia were heirs to a tradition not only of oral performance, but of oral composition.[1] He argued strongly for a complete divide between the non-literate authors of the Homeric epics and the scribes who later wrote them down.[4] Lord studied and made field recordings of Serbian heroic epics sung to the gusle, most notable of poets he worked with was Avdo Međedović.[5][6] He studied not only Homeric epics, but also Beowulf, Gilgamesh, and others.[5] Across these many story traditions he found strong commonalities concerning the oral composition of traditional storytelling.
Personal life
His wife, Mary Louise Lord née Carlson, taught classics at Connecticut College; they had two children. Lord died in July 1991 at Cambridge, Massachusetts.[1]
